Deluge

The scriptural deluge is regarded by historians and
critical exegetes as a legendary product. The legend of a universal
deluge is in itself a myth and cannot be anything else. (1)
It is most nakedly and unreservedly mythological.

The tradition of a universal deluge is told by all ancient
civilizations, and also by races that never reached the ability to express
themselves in the written symbols of a language. It is found all over
the world, on all continents, on the islands of the Pacific and Atlantic,
everywhere. Usually it is explained as a local experience carried from
race to race by word of mouth. The work of collating such material has
repeatedly been done, and it would only fatigue the reader were I to repeat
these stories as told in all parts of the world, even in places never
visited by missionaries.(2)

The rest of the collected traditions are also not identical
in detail, and are sometimes very different in their setting from the
Noah story, but all agree that the earth was covered to the mountain tops
by the water of the deluge coming from above, and that only a few human
beings escaped death in the flood. The stories are often accompanied by
details about a simultaneous cleavage of the earth.(3)

In pre-Columbian America the story of a universal flood
was very persistent; the first world-age was called Atonatiuh, or the
age that was brought to its end by a universal deluge. This is written
and illustrated in the ancient codices of the Mexicans and was narrated
to the Spaniards who came to the New Continent.(4)
The natives of Australia, Polynesia, and Tasmania, discovered in the seventeenth
century, related almost identical traditions.(5)

Clay tablets with inscriptions concerning the early
ages and the deluge were found in Mesopotamia. Their similarity to the
biblical account, and to the story of the Chaldean priest Berosus(6)
who lived in the Hellenistic age, caused a great sensation at the end
of the last century and the beginning of the current one. On this sensational
discovery was based the sensational pamphlet Babel und Bibel by
Friedrich Delitsch (1902) who tried to show in it that the Hebrews had
simply borrowed this story, along with many others, from the Babylonian
store of legends.

But if here and there the story of the flood could be
said to have been borrowed by the scriptural writer from the Babylonians,
and by some natives from the missionaries, in other cases no such explanation
could be offered. The indigenous character of the stories in many regions
of the world makes the borrowing theory seem very fragile.

Geologists see vestiges of diluvial rains all over the
world; folklorists hear the story of a universal flood wherever folklore
is collected; historians read of a universal flood in American manuscripts,
in Babylonian clay tablets and in the annals of practically all cultured
peoples. But the climatologists make it very clear that even should the
entire water content of the atmosphere pour down as rain, the resulting
flood could not have covered even the lowland slopes, far less the peaks
of the mountains, as all accounts insist that this deluge did.